Hospitals and Parasites

I have been incredibly ill for the past four days. Parasites and infections and abdominal pain and absolute hell. Without grossing you out with too much detail, imagine the worst diarrhea you've ever had, combined with complete constipation. And then add on a bunch of other unpleasant symptoms, and imagine being in so much pain that the only way to go to bed was to take sleeping pills. AGONY, I CAN TELL YOU. So on Ultra Bad Day #1 I went to a doctor and got some medicine for amoeba parasites and some painkillers and hoped I'd be okay.

However, the following night I thought I was dying, lying in the bathtub until 3am crying because it was the only thing that made me feel about 1% better. When morning rolled around I was frantically emailing my friend Danica who's an expert on infectious diseases and is currently working with the Gates Foundation in Vietnam, trying to figure out if what I had was actually deadly. Luckily it was decided by people here that I should go to the hospital, but I could barely walk through the house to the car, with two friends / translators for the day helping me. The first hospital we arrived at refused to treat me. There were no signs anywhere and I was having trouble walking, but we went up and down stairs and elevators and tried three different offices and kept being turned away, even as I was sobbing in the waiting rooms.

Finally we gave up (turns out that section was a private "members only" sort of place) and drove across Gombe district to another hospital. The drive was agonizing; I was huddled in the backseat of the car riding through the dusty dirt roads of Kinshasa, wincing every time we hit a pothole (every ten feet), with ice packs around my neck, hoping the roulages (traffic police) wouldn't blockade our car and demand money.

In this hospital they were more helpful. They admitted me (yay!), took lots of tests, hooked me up to an IV, and argued incessantly with Perry and Becky, who I'd arrived with. I think on the nurses' parts there was a little bit of offense taken by the two white girls telling them how to do their job, but from my vulnerable perspective, it was needed as they were going to perform the most ridiculous unnecessary procedures on me. Finally Perry had a strong talking to with the nice smiley young doctor, and he asked the nurses to perform a procedure (which I will not talk about) that made me feel 10,000 times better. I only hope that the very sick baby and also the snoring, ranting feverish woman who were in the same room as me are feeling better too. The best part of the day was having a giggle attack at the mosquito netting above my bed, from all the pain medication they gave me, but the lowest point was when Becky was in the middle of translating the procedure that was about to happen to me, and the nurse slammed the door in her face and then approached me with a foot long tube and a bunch of needles. HORROR. Especially when the world was a little drugged and loopy.

All in all we spent a solid 4 hours in the hospital (one of which was just for paying, as a nurse disappeared with our $10 change). I left feeling a lot better, and with yet more antibiotics. I have ten days of internal hell ahead of me...but hopefully in the end I will win, and the enemies devouring my insides will lose. I have no idea how I got so sick, as there are about ten thousand potential possibilities that for the past four days have been floating through my head, and I'm still not ready to google amoebas. But now that I've experienced parasites and third world hospitals I can cross them off my list and never ever have to deal with them again. I hope.